The Good Old Days

The Good Old Days
Ah, memories…Can you think about your favorite memory? Be nostalgic for a few minutes…What is your favorite memory? (wait for responses) Why is it your favorite memory?
There’s usually some kind of emotion that’s connected to our favorite memories…Joy, excitement, love…There’s something kind of feeling that’s connected to those memories…If we have something physical to remind us of that, it serves to remind us somewhat of the memory itself, but more to remind us of the emotions that we feel…
There’s nothing wrong with memories…The ones that we’ve shared today have been ones that have meant so much to us and still mean much to us right now! The problem comes when we only live in the memories…Watch this clip as Uncle Rico talks with his nephew Kip…(clip)…
Now, it’s funny to watch Uncle Rico living in 1982 as he tries to recapture his high school football days…It’s funny because they’re obviously playing it to an extreme! But if we dissect the clip a little bit more…Uncle Rico can’t leave that moment where they lost the football game in 1982 and he wasn’t even playing in the game! He fantasizes that if he had been playing, they surely would have won…Being trapped in his memories, he throws a steak and hits his other nephew Napoleon in the head…Staying trapped in his memories not only kept Uncle Rico from moving on, but it caused physical injury to Napoleon…Uncle Rico was living in his memories…
There’s nothing wrong with remembering, but when that remembering the good old days paralyzes from moving on, it becomes dangerous…
Sometimes it’s easier to live in the “good old days” because it’s comfortable…We know what those were like because we’ve lived them…And we’ve obviously survived those good old days to be here now…There’s a song by Christian musician Chris Rice, who himself is in his late 40’s, and his song recounts his 8th grade year. The chorus of the song goes like this, “Why does the past always seem safer? Maybe because at least we know we made it.”
So, we’ve talked about our favorite memories…We’ve seen a video clip about the dangers of living only in our memories…We’ve talked about why it’s easy to live in the “good old days.” But surely those people in the Bible wouldn’t live like that…The Israelites…The disciples…They surely wouldn’t live only in the good old days!
Well…I hate to break the news to you…But the people that are written about in the Bible…Well, they’re not perfect…And that’s what makes them so amazing…That they weren’t perfect, and God who is, worked in and through them…
The Israelites, the Jewish people…They are coming to an important juncture in their lives…They’ve been taken from their homes again and again…And at this point, they’re in exile from their homes…And they’re looking at the task of rebuilding their lives, their communities, their homes…And it’s looking to be very difficult…Can you imagine being torn from what you know is your home and where you’ve been most comfortable and being placed in a new land and you have to start all over? It’s scary…It’s so much easier to look to the past and to live in the good old days…
The Israelites were supposed to be rebuilding the temple…The temple where they would worship God and where they were to give a home to God…Well, that’s what they were supposed to be doing…But they stopped working…Because it all seemed too hard…So they stopped trying…Because it was scary…
Do you know what it’s like to look and see a new place, a new time, a new culture and not recognize…And have to make your home in it? I would guess that we all know that feeling more than we recognize it…Because this world that we live in is like that…We look at the world and it’s not the same as when we grew up…There are all kinds of evidences of it…From the way schools operate…To the programs on television…To the music on the radio…To the way people talk…Do you know what it’s like to look and see a new place, a new time, a new culture and not recognize anything?
It can be scary and hard to look around and see a world that we don’t recognize…Can you see why it’s so easy and tempting to live in the good old days? “Why does the past always seem safer? Maybe it’s because at least we know we made it.”
The Israelites were stuck…They’d given up…They wanted to live only in the good old days…We’re not sure exactly how long they had stopped working, but it was a considerable period of time…It took at least a month from the time they were spoken to by the prophet Haggai to continue…
Haggai gave them a message from God that they were supposed to be working on this temple…Their place of worship…That they had stopped working on because it was too hard…And God wasn’t exactly pleased…Why do you think that God wasn’t pleased? It’s not because that meant that they didn’t have a temple or a place to worship…Or that God didn’t have a house or a place on earth…
God wasn’t exactly pleased because by stopping work and living in the good old days, they had stopped trusting God. By living in the good old days, they had stopped believing that God is not only the God of our past…but the God of our present…And the God of our future…In fact, it is because of God that we have a future…The Israelites had limited God to only be a part of their past by living in the good old days…As Luke reminds us, God is the God not only of the dead, but of the living…
When you look at your own lives, are there places where you are living in the good old days? The places where you are inviting God only to be a part of the past and not the present or the future…Where are you living in the good old days?
When we look at our life as Sheridan-Norway United Methodist Church, are there places where we are living in the good old days? The places where we are inviting God only to be a part of the past and not the present or the future? Where are we living in the good old days?
There’s nothing wrong with remembering…To look at the past and remember…Just like the memories that we shared, we don’t live in those…But we connect with the emotions…And instead of wanting things to be like they were in the good old days…We should want to help others connect with the emotions that we felt…Joy, love, excitement…Not just the way that we did in our memories, but so that they have their own memories…And we may just add a few more to our own…
We can’t live in the good old days…It’s not fair to anyone…It’s not fair to the world…It’s not fair to ourselves…It’s not fair to God…We live in the good now days…We live in the good yet to come days…God is the God not only of our past, but the God of our present, and the God of our future…Let’s live like it…